"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement

Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

The Long Rain

It’s been raining for days and days here in L.A., and I can’t stop thinking of Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “The Long Rain.” Bradbury no doubt gets the physics, geology, and biology of a world of endless rain quite wrong – I don't think he ever claimed to be a hard SF writer – but it’s a terrific story all the same. It’s been filmed a couple of times, once as a segment of the movie version of The Illustrated Man, and once as an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater. Both versions are well done, but the only one I can find online is the former. (You’ll have to follow the link to “The Illustrated Man (1969) Part 8” at the end for the conclusion. What you see below starts abruptly, but it’s only a couple of minutes into the segment, which begins at the tail end of “Part 6.”)

Dr. Feser,I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the movie The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick.I don't know how true this is, but I've heard from some very reputable sources that Malick is devoutly Catholic but because of his reclusive nature you only can pick up on it in his films: especially "The Thin Red Line".... that it's just very thick with Catholic imagery.

I'm also from SoCal (San Bernardino). The amount of rain we've gotten in the last couple of days is about the same as we get in about three years.

By the way, I got your Philosophy of Mind, Aquinas, and TLS books. They arrived in the mail today. However, they're Christmas presents that I bought for myself for my mother, and I can't read them until after I open them on Christmas! Still, I browsed through them before wrapping them for myself, and they look very very promising.

It'll be nice to read about Thomism again, after engulfing myself in contemporary philosophy these last couple of months.

Jeffrey E. Brower's discussions with regards to Aristotelian endurantism as well as Aquinas on mental representation (if you don't know him already that is) are quite interesting. Your views would views with regards to his discussion on mental representation would be much appreciated.

Thanks for a great blog.Link:http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~brower/research.htm

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.